Child Law and Safety

The State run Departments of Child Safety and our Federal Family Law System are in crisis;Regularly and significantly it is failing our children, families and victims of violence and abuse. The Departments of Child Safety need to brought together under one federal department, rather than the various, inconsistent, state departments with vastly different regulatory, funding and training requirements.Child safety officers;must be adequately trained, not only in the signs of physical abuse, but emotional/psychological abuse signs as well. Staff needs to be qualified to work in these areas, and to work under the supervision of senior officers for a minimum of 12 months before being permitted to manage their own cases. All staff needs to be accountable, and their work and methods transparent and justifiable, with regular case reviews and consistent follow up and case supervision by senior officers. This can only be achieved through consistent nation-wide regulations, training and funding.This new federal department of child safety needs to work hand in hand with the Family Court of Australia.All matters regarding children and abuse or family violence should be immediately removed from the Federal Magistrates Court, where judges have little experience and workloads and cascading inadequacies see matters taking years to be settled - and placed back with the more specialised Family Court, with matters under this umbrella dealt with through the existing Magellan protocols – where cases are managed in a timely manner and investigated and determined by a team of specialised professionals . The breadth of individual judicial discretion has become far too wide in our legal system. This needs to be reigned back in and judges and expert witnesses need to be subject to disciplinary action when their behaviour exceeds the actual or implied limits of their position – currently they are all but above the law. There is no accountability, no transparency and there is little avenue for redress for victims of the system.Funding; which has been repeatedly cut needs to be reinstated, and serious penalties for deliberately false and/or misleading statements (perjury) need to be reinstated in order to bring these lengthy protracted, damaging and dangerous proceedings back to a reasonable time frame. We need to stop re-traumatising survivors and stop endangering our children.Expert witnesses; contracted by the family law system need to have adequate experience in private practice before being permitted to perform potentially life changing reports for the courts. Private practice experience of no less than 3 years, specialising in children and adolescence, alcohol and drug dependency, family violence and/or severe personality disorders.All interviews; for Family Reports and single expert witnesses need to be recorded in order to ensure accountability and the fundamental right of Australians to be able to cross-examine and investigate if needed, how and why the report’s conclusions have been reached.Single experts; also need to be limited on the number of reports they can prepare on an annual basis for these proceedings. Reports are lucrative for private practitioners and there are far too many who have, unbelievably, performed hundreds, in some cases thousands, of these reports, on top of their other commitments, in comparatively short periods of time. It simply is not possible, to be performing thorough and accurate investigations under those circumstances.

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